Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 65, no. 1 (Spring 2021), pgs. 29–34
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
Arnstein, Barbara. “An Interview with Paul Taylor.” Baum Bugle 37, no. 1 (1993): 15–16.
MLA 9th ed.:
Arnstein, Barbara. “An Interview with Paul Taylor.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 37, no. 1, 1993, pp. 15–16.
(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with illustrations that have not been reproduced here. However, at the request of the author, the text has been modified to reflect accuracy that was not present in the original published version.)
More than 120 years after the original publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it seems like a new Oz sequel materializes every time a shopper refreshes Amazon.com.
Not so very long ago, however, new Oz books were far rarer. There were two primary and obvious reasons for this: almost all of the titles in the original Oz series remained under copyright, and self-publishing a book was prohibitively expensive for would-be authors.
For most of the twentieth century, these dual forces were sufficiently powerful to dissuade many potential Royal Historians of Oz from pursuing publication, with the occasional exception. When L. Frank Baum’s widow, Maud, read the manuscript of Invisible Inzi of Oz, written by two children who later claimed that the story was dictated to them by the late author via their Ouija board, she authorized the story’s serial publication in an obscure children’s magazine in 1925 and 1926. Maud’s oldest son, Frank Joslyn Baum, released his own Oz sequel, The Laughing Dragon of Oz, eight years later, only to be sued successfully for copyright infringement by Reilly & Lee, the publisher of the official Oz books, and by his own mother.
After the original series concluded with Merry Go Round in Oz in 1963, a few privately published sequels surfaced, including Henry Blossom’s The Blue Emperor of Oz (1966), Jack and Larry Brenton’s The Ork in Oz (1974), Harry Mongold’s Button Bright of Oz (1979) and The Sawhorse of Oz (1981), and a series of books by March Laumer that began with The Green Dolphin of Oz (1978). These stories drew on the content of Baum titles still under copyright, but they managed to sail under the radar as inexpensively produced fan publications, usually peddled by the authors themselves.
The ground would soon shift, however, as Baum’s sequels to Wizard finally began to emerge from copyright year by year, widening the possibilities for latter-day Oz stories. The 1980s were a heady time for Oz enthusiasts. Disney’s Return to Oz (1985) was the first Oz film released by a major studio since the 1939 MGM classic. Meanwhile, Del Rey Books expanded its line of paperback reprints of the Oz series to include Ruth Plumly Thompson’s novels, which had been out of print for two decades.
Buckethead’s Beginnings
One Oz devotee had especially ambitious plans. The sixth Oz book, The Emerald City of Oz, had just entered public domain when, in 1986, Chris Dulabone launched a one-person publishing endeavor called Buckethead Enterprises of Oz. (I once asked Dulabone how he had landed on Buckethead as a name. In college, he told me, a friend had photographed him wearing a bucket on his head.)
Born in 1964, Christopher Michael Dulabone spent his first years in upstate New York with parents Carl and Shirley, older brother Dana, and older sister Sonja in a tri-level house on Keuka Lake that his father had built without power tools. The family moved to Albuquerque in 1971. Dana remembers his younger brother as an introvert who showed an early interest in puppeteering before acquiring an old manual typewriter on which he spent hours writing stories. With Dana’s help, Chris produced very small quantities of photocopied Oz publications in the late 1970s.
Chris did not particularly enjoy his English classes, Dana recalls. “How he got the craft that he did—I think it was natural,” he says. “He finally found what he wanted to do, and he did it.” And with the launch of Buckethead, Chris began to share his works with others.
The Winter 1986 Baum Bugle included a one-page advertising insert. “ANNOUNCING THE PUBLICATION OF TWO ALL-NEW OZ BOOKS!!! (QUALITY PAPERBACK!)” heralded the green flyer, at a time when the notion of new Oz books was still novel enough to constitute a self-evident selling point. The first Buckethead title, Toto in Oz by Dulabone (not to be confused with Gina Wickwar’s Toto of Oz), was a fairly modest effort. The book’s author illustrated it himself with crudely cartoonish drawings. Toto was produced using a broken typesetting machine; the odd spacing between letters made reading the book as much a labor of love as writing it had been. Dulabone, an educational assistant in Albuquerque’s public school system, financed Toto partly through selling his own blood plasma. Sweat and tears likely were involved, too.
Yellow Fog Over Oz, the second Buckethead book, again featured idiosyncratic typography and Dulabone illustrations, but it was also a significant publication: the first English-language translation of The Yellow Fog by Alexander Volkov, whose Magic Land series, based on Baum’s Oz books, was beloved in the Soviet Union but largely unknown in the United States.
International Wizard of Oz Club charter member Douglas Greene reviewed Buckethead’s maiden publications in the Spring 1987 Bugle. He began by mentioning the most noteworthy aspect of Dulabone’s enterprise: “For the first time, a publishing house has begun whose sole purpose is to make available new, book-length Oz pastiches.” Of Dulabone’s novel, Greene wrote, “Like the Baum and Thompson books, Toto in Oz is filled with puns; indeed, I doubt that Mr. Dulabone has overlooked any plays on words having to do with canines.” Turning to Yellow Fog, Greene proclaimed it “a fascinating book, one that will repay several readings, and its appearance in English is a major event.” He also criticized the uneven typesetting and hand-lettered covers and title pages as “not professional in appearance.” On the whole, however, Greene’s assessment was positive.
A Proud Publisher
The production values of Buckethead’s publications gradually improved. Dulabone soon published another new Volkov translation, The Secret of the Deserted Castle. Other noteworthy titles included reprints of rare Oz-related works such as Baum’s The Enchanted Island of Yew, which had been out of print since the 1920s; The Third Book of Oz, which collected the texts of Baum’s obscure Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz comic pages and The Woggle-Bug Book; The Foolish Fox, a children’s tale illustrated by John R. Neill and published originally in 1904; and the first book publication of the Ouija-dictated Invisible Inzi of Oz, with new illustrations by Eric Shanower.
Buckethead also made available for the first time the historically significant work The Dinamonster of Oz (1991) by Kenneth Gage Baum, L. Frank Baum’s youngest son, who wrote it in 1941. In a Winter 1991 Bugle review, Douglas Greene deemed Dinamonster the most important Buckethead publication to date. Previously unpublished novels by key figures from the Oz Club’s early years included Mister Flint in Oz (1987) by Ray Powell and The Lost Emeralds of Oz (1995) by Frederick E. Otto.
Professional writers appeared on Dulabone’s roster, too. Phyllis Ann Karr, a widely published author of fantasy, romance, and mystery novels, wrote The Gardener’s Boy of Oz (1988), a sequel to The Scarecrow of Oz, and The Hollyhock Dolls in Oz (2004). In the Autumn 1989 review of Gardener’s Boy, Charles Sabatos asserted that “the variety of Oz references, the quality of the writing, and the subtlety of characterization make this almost like a vintage Oz book.” Sean Duffley, reviewing Hollyhock Dolls in the Autumn 2004 issue, called it the work of “an assured and accomplished writer.” Dulabone also made available The Tired Tailor of Oz (2001) and The Merry Mountaineer of Oz (2004), both posthumous works by popular science fiction and fantasy author Lin Carter.
While Dulabone was particularly proud of the Volkov translations, Invisible Inzi, Dinamonster, and the Carter books, he considered his most important project to be the publication of the Seven Blue Mountains of Oz trilogy, written and illustrated by Melody Grandy. Over the course of three sprawling books, Grandy tells an epic story dominated by her most important original character, Zim the Flying Sorcerer. In the process, she brings Ozma face to face with alter ego Tippetarius, revisits and fleshes out many of Baum’s and Thompson’s characters and locales, and builds her own particular world within the existing Ozian mythos.
Reviewing the first volume, The Disenchanted Princess of Oz, in Spring 1996, Karr called Grandy “one of the best illustrators Oztory has ever had. Now it turns out that Melody Grandy the writer is very nearly the artist’s equal.” Karr returned to review its sequel, Tippetarius in Oz, in the Autumn 2001 issue, praising “the ingenious scholarship that places Oz in a solid context of humanitarian philosophy” and “the attention to characterization and character development throughout.”
I reviewed the third book, Zim Greenleaf of Oz, in Winter 2005:
The final book in Melody Grandy’s ambitious series is not merely attractive in its illustrations and typography. It is not simply well written, and it is pleasurable not only for its thoughtful allusions to everything from minor events in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to elements of Merry Go Round in Oz. Most importantly, it is effective and affecting in pure literary terms, because it so intelligently expresses ideas about the pros and cons of living or acting alone versus the merits and drawbacks of sharing one’s life or work; the hidden depths of those who appear unfathomable on the surface; and the long and thoroughly human process—sometimes spanning centuries—of achieving new and deeper and surprising kinds of maturity.
Dog Beats Fog
For Dulabone, however, prestige publications were beside the point. He learned this lesson early, when he expected Yellow Fog, with its more scholarly appeal, to outsell Toto, which he had published for fun. But Toto proved to be the more successful title.
Toto also exemplified the style of writing Dulabone would employ for the rest of his life: freewheeling, full of digressions, and rife with dogawful puns. For instance: “From the book, Toto learned that Arfrica had been discovered by Christopher Colliebus, who had also brought many immigrants to settle there. He also learned that there had been twenty First Magistrates before him. None of the former Magistrates had done much for the community; except one named Rover Cleaveland, who founded a university.”
Various Bugle reviews have referred to Dulabone’s puns with adjectives such as “terrible” and “excruciating.” Of course, Baum himself was guilty of such literary offenses. Dulabone would simply amp it up to eleven, and then create a character named, say, Ompy Ampy for good measure. The puns reached high tide in the undersea adventure A Viking in Oz (1988):
“The only place you could be proper is somewhere over the rainbow-trout. And as I am CURRENTly on a winning stream, I don’t want any kind of distraction that could make me blow-fish it.”
“You are far too proud and stern, Mr. Manwen. But as your employee, I must recognize that you are the bass. Therefore, I’ll try not to arouse your anchor on porpoise—Cod kelp me.”
Despite the wordplay, Dulabone took Oz very seriously. Author and illustrator Marcus Mébès, Dulabone’s longtime friend and collaborator, says that Oz “was everything to him. He would get angry with me sometimes when I would call it a children’s fictional series. . . . He told me that we were writing histories.”
Dulabone also was involved with the Oz Club. Apart from reviewing books for The Baum Bugle, he staged a production of The King of Gee-Whiz, an unrealized musical coauthored by Baum and Emerson Hough, at the 1994 Winkie Convention. From 1996 to 1999, Dulabone edited the Oz Club’s annual calendar. But his overwhelming focus was on Oz publishing.
To Encourage a Child
I submitted my first Oz manuscript to Buckethead in the fall of 1989, when I was eleven years old. Dulabone responded with a typed, single-spaced, four-page letter, full of both encouragement and gentle explanations of the mistakes I’d unwittingly made—mostly, that I’d used many characters still under copyright. At the end of the letter, he wrote, “I do feel that you have some talent, and that all you need to put forth your genius is a chance…. You have the ability, and I don’t want to be the one to suppress it!”
While he must have known that I was quite young, Dulabone spoke to me as an equal. Encouraged, I completely rewrote the manuscript and sent him the new version. At his request, I also did my own layout and illustrations.
A Wonderful Journey in Oz was published in June 1990, not long before my 12th birthday. In hindsight, I would say that most juvenilia are better left unpublished, at least in their original form. Dulabone was not much for editing, and in fact had made only a few general suggestions for improving the book; there were no line edits at all. (Mébès, whose early Oz works were also published by Buckethead when he was young, told me he, too, wished Dulabone had edited him.) That said, if Dulabone had not believed in my potential strongly enough to publish my youthful efforts, I’m not sure if I would have gone on to become a full-time professional writer.
Mébès and I were far from isolated cases. Dulabone’s other adolescent and teenage authors included Nate Barlow (Veggy Man of Oz), Jeremy Steadman (The Emerald Ring of Oz), Annie Brzozowski (Pegasus in Oz and The Joust in Oz), Julia Inglis (The Magic Ruby of Oz), and Amanda Buck (The Cloud King of Oz). Dulabone also published several collaborative works created by his students when he was working as an educational assistant. Acinad Goes to the Emerald City of Oz (1988), The Magic Diamond of Oz (1989), and Dorothy Returns to Oz (1990) were written and illustrated by fourth- and fifth-graders.
Around the same time, Dulabone encouraged a fifth-grade class taught by Serafin Padilla to write, illustrate, and publish Our Trip to Oz (1989). Calling themselves the Wiz Kids of Oz, Padilla’s classes self-published an Oz book annually for the next six years.
Dulabone may well have been recalling his own earliest works when urging young authors to write. Among Buckethead’s publications was Egor’s Funhouse Goes to Oz (1994), a collection of stories that he had written when he was seven.
“Chris Dulabone had a profound influence on my childhood through long-lasting encouragement for my professional writing,” says Julia Inglis. “I wrote a twenty-chapter children’s book when I was twelve years old, and he agreed to publish it, reinforcing my confidence as a child writer. I am also a published author as an adult. I will always remember the indelible influence Chris had over my career in those early years.”
Buckethead published Nate Barlow’s first book when he was thirteen. Barlow, who later pursued a creative career path in the film industry, recalls that “having a project shepherded from my initial vision to fully realized completion was an invaluable experience. I learned vast amounts about the mechanics of the process, creative collaboration, and . . . copyright law! . . . Most importantly, the process showed me what could be done, that being published was not simply a pie-in-the-sky dream unattainable save for a few but a goal fully within anyone’s grasp—the complexity of the process not something to be feared but to be embraced.”
Books by the Bushel
Dulabone wanted to bring to light as much Oz history as possible. He published nearly five dozen books under the Buckethead Enterprises of Oz imprint. In 1998, he rebranded as Tails of the Cowardly Lion and Friends (TOTCLAF), ultimately releasing more than 50 additional titles. Over the course of more than three decades, Dulabone published more than 100 new Oz books or collections of Oz stories through Buckethead Enterprises of Oz; TOTCLAF; and the Ozian Seahorse Press, a subsidiary imprint of Buckethead that he originally intended for me to develop into my own independent operation, but which remained under the Buckethead umbrella instead. He always emphasized that he published books at cost and made no profit. Forty books written or coauthored by Dulabone himself have seen print.
In his article “Why Do People Keep Writing Oz Stories?” for the Autumn 1990 Bugle, Dulabone pointed out that many latter-day authors wish to tie up loose ends or resolve discrepancies in earlier books. But he also invoked more emotional motivations:
Oz played a part in influencing our social lives and has had a profound effect on our moral conduct, our way of life, and our very opinion of the world around us. Oz taught us to have confidence; to believe in our own minds, hearts and nerve; and to treat others as equals, even if they are different from us. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with its simple philosophy, has touched the lives of our fellow citizens for generations and will likely continue to do so. Our fairyland is more than just a simple children’s fantasy. It is unreasonable to allow the story of Oz to be complete in only one book or only forty books. How could we allow the end of the series that has meant so much to all of us for so long?
Marin Xiques became acquainted with Dulabone when she sent him the manuscript of The Silver Shoes of Oz (1990), her first Oz book. Eventually, she would be his most frequent coauthor—as of this writing, more than a dozen of their collaborations have been published—and the love of his life.
Xiques’s description of their collaborative process resembles that of a game of table tennis. “When we wrote a book together, we would each write alternating chapters,” she says. “It was a lot of fun for us, each seeing what the other wrote.”
Dulabone also inspired others to pursue their own publishing endeavors. His lengthy online timeline placing the events depicted in Oz books in chronological order compelled Joe Bongiorno to create the sprawling Royal Timeline of Oz website. Bongiorno also founded the Royal Publisher of Oz in 2014. While less prolific than Buckethead or TOTCLAF, Bongiorno’s imprint has released nearly a dozen titles.
Bongiorno recalls feeling startled when he received his first order of Buckethead and TOTCLAF books and realized some of them had been written and illustrated by children. Although Bongiorno has focused on producing more highly polished volumes, he gives Dulabone credit for paving the way: “The Royal Publisher of Oz came from the realization that there were still some great Oz stories out there that weren’t getting published anywhere . . . Chris was inspirational in that I saw that if he could prolifically put out material, I should be able to do something.”
Man on a Mission
In recent years, Dulabone’s physical health had suffered, which took an emotional toll. But in the past year, Dana Dulabone explains, Chris had made dramatic improvements in his physical and mental well-being. In the context of this upward trajectory, Chris’s sudden death on December 10, 2020, at his home in Belen, New Mexico, from complications of diabetes seems particularly tragic. He was fifty-six. Since Chris’s passing, Dana says, he has received many condolences from as far away as Germany, Australia, and Ireland: “I never understood the reach that my brother had.”
I recently went through my file of the letters Chris wrote to me, which begin in 1989, when I was eleven and he was twenty-five. They peter out sometime around 1996, when email began to displace traditional correspondence. (He never dated his letters, so I can only approximate.) Although our friendship was almost entirely epistolary, I did meet him for the first time at the 1992 Winkie Convention. As a bookish adolescent from Texas, I wasn’t quite sure initially what to make of this long-haired man with a goatee, an Oz earring, and a decidedly offbeat sense of humor. The relationship continued, of course, although I saw him only twice more, at the 1998 and 1999 Winkie Conventions.
Coming back to these missives for the first time in decades, I am struck anew by how single-mindedly devoted Chris was to Oz. While other interests crop up, he quickly turns back to the question of how to publish more Oz books and disseminate them more widely.
It still stings to read his angry letter in response to my determination that I could not take on the independent operation of the Ozian Seahorse Press (OSP) imprint when I was still a sophomore in high school. Chris had financed the first OSP publication himself but eventually was urging me to get a job to fund future books before I was old enough to work legally. Given how he had always related to me as a peer, I imagine he had forgotten just how young I was. In hindsight, I understand also that he could see the correct priorities so clearly—Oz books, Oz books, and more Oz books—and must have been frustrated and bewildered that I apparently could not.
We remained friends despite those intermittent tensions. I attempted to interview Chris for a Baum Bugle profile on the occasion of Buckethead’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 2011, but we were unable to make it happen. I regret that the piece I wanted to write must now be posthumous.
I did once send him a letter to thank him for seeing and cultivating the potential in an impossibly young author who, like him, had been thoroughly captivated by Oz. His response is the last piece of physical correspondence I ever received from him. “It is good to know what a positive part of your life I was,” he wrote. “Maybe my life was not entirely in vain.”
SIDEBAR #1: Author Favorites: The Gardener’s Boy of Oz (1988) by Phyllis Ann Karr
When [the book] first came out in the late 1980s, it was a gargantuan feat for any publisher, let alone a small vanity press. The book was extremely well-written by Phyllis Ann Karr, already a notable writer with many published works under her belt. The art by Melody Grandy was among some of the best and most professional of any new publication. Melody herself did the color separations for the wraparound cover of the book, and Phyllis is to be credited for the typography used inside. By the standards of vanity presses of the time, it was leaps and bounds beyond anything I’d seen. The scarcity of a new Oz book also helped make Gardener’s Boy a rare treat. Phyllis wrote about Pon from Baum’s The Scarecrow of Oz, as well as familiar characters like Queen Ann, Tititi-Hoochoo, and Krewl, while also introducing wonderful new characters that stand on their own.
The copy that arrived in the mail was such a delectable, sumptuous feast that I read it in one day and still remember the experience. I miss the joy of discovery, and I have Chris Dulabone, Phyllis Ann Karr, and Melody Grandy to thank for one of my most enduring memories of Oz fandom. —Marcus Mébès
SIDEBAR #2: Author Favorites: Invisible Inzi of Oz (1993) by Virginia and Robert Wauchope
I bought it for three reasons. The story had a fascinating origin: Virginia and Robert Wauchope claimed that the tale came to them through a Ouija board. Second, I wanted every story about Oz I could get my hands on. Finally, Eric Shanower illustrated it.
I loved Invisible Inzi because it’s a wonderful Oz tale that’s both exciting and humorous. Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Patchwork Girl, the Wizard, and a few other friends try to recover Glinda’s books of magic. They set off on an adventure where they meet people from Musicton, where singing never stops, and Flattown, where—you guessed it—everything is flat. After several adventures, Ozma joins the group. They all receive help from Invisible Inzi (who has a remarkable tale of her own) as they try to recover the books of magic from the wicked magician Kuik Blackbab. This book entertained me the first time I read it; I’ve reread Invisible Inzi several times and still love it. —Peter Schulenburg
SIDEBAR #3: Author Favorites: Bucketheads in Oz (2010) by Greg Gick, Melody Grandy, Greg Hunter, Phyllis Ann Karr, Chuck Sabatos, Deen Shumate, Jim Vander Noot, and Chris Dulabone
One of my favorites . . . and not just because Chris Dulabone had a hand in writing it. It’s a wacky, rollicking, thought-provoking Ozzy collaboration between Greg Gick, Melody Grandy, Greg Hunter, Phyllis Ann Karr, Chuck Sabatos, Deen Shumate, Jim Vander Noot, and Chris himself. A female Nome, a Wogglebug (not the Highly Magnified one), a considerate Kalidah, and a friendly Hammerhead are just a few of the characters who, while on a journey to seek the help of the good sorcerer Zim Greenleaf, have one outlandish adventure after another. And when Mombi puts in an appearance and is out for revenge, you’ll see why wishing for more wishes is a very bad idea. —Marin Xiques
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